- Widget Toolkits:
- Graphical buttons, menus, test-entry boxes, etc. are all called
Widgets. Since the primary use of widgets in
NeXtMidas and X-Midas is to control the application, widgets are
commonly nicknamed Controls.
- Groups of similarly-designed widgets are often grouped together
in a Toolkit.
- There are three common toolkits used with Java.
- AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit)
- This was the first Java toolkit created by Sun Microsystems.
- Included with all Java releases (but support for AWT
has been limited since Java 5).
- Swing
- This was the second Java toolkit created by Sun Microsystems.
- Supports a Pluggable Look and Feel allowing a
Swing Widget to look and act like widgets from other toolkits,
without altering any code.
- Included with Java 1.2 and later.
- SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit)
- This is a rival toolkit that was started by IBM and is maintained by
the Eclipse people.
- SWT does not provide a Pluggable Look and Feel the way Swing does.
- SWT is not part of Java and requires a separate OS-specific
download.
- Java applets using SWT will not run unless SWT has been
installed on every system.
- NeXtMidas uses a combination of AWT and Swing.
- Until recently, NeXtMidas was required to support Java 1.1 and had to use AWT.
- NeXtMidas is slowly migrating from AWT to Swing.
- Since many NeXtMidas applications are deployed as applets, SWT is not an option
at this time.